Fred Hiltz and the rest of the batty western bishops take note.
From here

The savagery that we see in Africa is not because there’s something funny in the water. It’s not because they’re still hunter-gatherer types at heart and can’t forget some archaic gripe with the neighbours. Africa used to be quite a nice place 40 years ago. But since then, a gigantic volume of aid has wrecked the fabric of civil society. And what has all this aid done to fight African poverty? The UN declared in 1999 that 70 countries – all aid recipients – were poorer than they had been in 1980. The countries that had received the most aid – like Liberia, Zaire and Somalia – had descended in barbarism and anarchy.

Once again, the process by which aid corrupts is blindingly obvious. And yet we keep shovelling the stuff in. As for the trickle that actually buys food for people, every study we have shows how this pushes countries into a terrifying dependency on food imports. I needn’t spell out the devastating effects of this on the domestic economy (which is mainly agrarian) or on their chances of fighting their way to affluence.

The big shame is that we don’t let African farmers sell their food to the US and the EU. Subsidies, tariffs and so on. People who are against free trade in food should be really ashamed of themselves.

The reason Africans don’t have food is civil war. African farmers know how to grow food. Indeed, they know how to grow food so well, that the EU and USA put up trade barriers to stop them from exporting it and undercutting their own farmers. Famine in Africa is rarely caused by natural disasters these days. It’s caused by aid.

Giving poor people food seems to make sense to us in the west. We see a homeless tramp and we direct them to the nearest soup kitchen. But on the scale we’re talking, the economic effect of just giving people food is not good. Suppose your economy relies on producing cars. But it’s in a bad way, not least because rich countries nearby have put up trade barriers to prevent you selling your cars to them. Then they see you’re doing badly. So what do they do? They send you some free cars. The local car manufacturers are none too happy, and the economy is buggered.
Well it’s the same with Africa and food. Forget aid. Africa needs free trade.

And while we’re here we must emphasise free trade rather than the hideous slice of colonialism called ‘fair trade’. Fair Trade is nothing more than a rearguard PR exercise from the greens. They were embarrassed at opposing free trade, so had to do little linguistic fancy foot-work. Fair Trade says, OK the poor can sell their food to the rich world, but only if they are organic farmer (ie. they retain backward, not very productive farming techniques), and we will favour small peasant farms (which are famously no good at producing food efficiently). People who advocate ‘Fair Trade’ are just bastards.